Three things came to my mind as I was walking out of the Read Write Web (Un) Conference last week .

•    Unconferences are here to stay: I have to admit I was a skeptic going to a conference that had no set agenda or speakers, but it quickly became evident that this was not about the speakers or the agenda; it was about the participants and what they wanted to hear and discuss.  The agenda was decided by the participants at the start of the day. The agenda had different tracks with hour-long discussion topics in each track. These well-moderated discussions turned out to be more open, collaborative, thought-provoking and, hence, more informative and effective. Every participant seemed to get something out of it.  I am not quite sure how this will work with thousands of participants, but it can very effective for smaller groups.

•    Leveraging events effectively in real time: The conference was all about real time, and it was interesting to hear others echo my observations around enterprise adoption of real-time event processing. Enterprises are starting to reap the benefits of real-time events by being able to correlate events to make the right decision. Enterprises who have integrated their applications via an event bus can now analyze these events in real time to offer better services to their customers. For instance, when a customer service representative (CSR) receives a call from an irate customer to cancel a service, the CSR can offer the right incentive based on the customer’s usage patterns. We are also starting to see enterprises reaching out to social media sites (like Twitter, Facebook) and analyzing these feeds in real time to offer enhanced services to their customers. With technologies like Cloud Computing that accelerate the delivery of applications, there is probably going to be further surge of events that needs to be correlated to make useful business decisions.

•    Context is king: If you are like me, you receive hundreds of emails a day; you are part of many different social networks that include a large number of Twitter followers and Facebook friends. You wake up and turn on your iPhone or Blackberry (or your favorite PDA) to check out the top 10 tech blog sites and the aggregated news and stock alerts. This is not just information overload; this is literally an implosion of information that has a very short life span. Content was king a few years back, but with so many aggregated sources of information, it’s not just content but context that is critical in this new world. “Getting the right information to the right person at the right time and nothing else” is going to be the winning mantra of the future.

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